As your financial planner, our goal is to make sure that you have all the financial solutions in place that will help you achieve your goals. This includes your life, trauma, health and income protection insurance cover. But as part of our job, we want to ensure that you have fire and general insurance (house, contents, vehicle, boat) in place that will work for you.
Fire and General insurance cover is a specialist area of advice, one that we are not experts in. We aim to make sure that you have the cover in place and that you have thought through the levels of cover (and that you review that cover regularly.)
As with all the discussions around insurance that we have with our clients, the cheapest may not be the best insurance. With Life/Trauma/Income Protection/Health insurance, our recommendations balance out the cost with the benefits and the claims paying reputation of the insurer.
Personally, we use an independent fire and general insurance broker - Chris Rolfe at Bridges Insurance in Hamilton. We have worked with Chris and his team for many years and have had fantastic claims experience (and the cost seems extremely reasonable - knowing that we are getting specialist expertise and advice.)
While some of our clients have started working with Bridges, other clients are happily working with AMI, State or other 'direct to market' insurers. However, there has recently been some controversy over a new market entrant Youi, who have been aggressively marketing and advertising.
The point of this blog post is to bring this to your attention, so that you are fully informed in the decisions that you make - you may decide to deal with Youi - but at least you will be aware of some of their practices.
The first article is the long investigative article published on interest.co.nz by Diana Clement. The second article is a shorter version published in the NZ Herald.
In a major investigation Diana Clement talks to Youi customers & ex-employees about the insurer and uncovers startling allegations of serious misconduct
Diana Clement: Insurance company's sales tactics shocking
If you have any thoughts or opinions that you would like to share, visit us at our Twitter, Facebook or Linked In pages, and comment.
For more blog entries that you might be interested in:
Is your ‘stuff’ properly insured?
Insurance Cover- Don’t assume….
By Carey Church
